The Art of Medicine

In 1986, Oliver Sacks was one of 10 doctors who wrote about their lives as both physicians and writers in the Book Review. Sacks contrasted himself with a doctor novelist, saying: “I have no literary aspirations whatever, only the desire to report clinical reality in all its richness.”

Whatever his stated aspirations, Sacks has always been acclaimed for his literary qualities. Just a few weeks earlier in 1986, reviewing Sacks’ collection of case studies “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” in the Book Review, John C. Marshall wrote that Sacks “sees the human condition like a philosopher-poet” and “recounts these histories with the lucidity and power of a gifted short-story writer.”

Sacks, 81, recently disclosed that he has terminal cancer, which has made the publication of his new memoir, “On the Move,” particularly bittersweet for his many admirers. (Andrew Solomon reviews the book this week.)

In the Book Review in 2001, Natalie Angier, reviewing “Uncle Tungsten,” one of Sacks’ previous memoirs, called the author’s prose “luminous, numinous, glimmering, shimmering, incandescent, radiant.”

Sacks’s very first book, “Migraine,” published in 1970, was assessed in The New York Review of Books by no less an eminence than W. H. Auden. The poet and critic said that Sacks’ primary purpose might be to “enlighten his fellow practitioners,” but that “any layman who is at all interested in the relation between body and mind, even if he does not understand all of it, will find the book as fascinating as I have.”

Quotable

“In fiction . . . monogamy often gets you nowhere. Without conflict and tension, there’s no story, so writers have to make their characters misbehave, suffer and cause others to suffer.” — David Gates, in an interview with Tweed’s

Remeeting Waterloo

June 18 is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, the day that has become shorthand for decisive defeat. In this week’s Shortlist, Mike Rapport reviews four new books coinciding with the bicentenary, including Alan Forrest’s “Waterloo.” Forrest writes that the “contrast between victory and defeat is never starker than in military memoirs.” He quotes from the haunting eyewitness account of a French soldier named Lerréguy de Civrieux: “Two or three times, Marshal Ney, dismounted, without servants, appeared to us, sword in hand, bareheaded, marching with difficulty, embarrassed by his big boots in this slippery ground, soaked from the day before. His brilliant voice succeeded in rallying a handful of soldiers; but what could this illustrious and unhappy warrior achieve against so many enemies and in this chaos! Vainly, he searched for death.”